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<font face="Times New Roman, Times" color="#0000FF"><u>
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112207334.html">
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112207334.html</a>
<br>
</u></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times"> <br>
</font><font size=1 color="#CC0000"><b>BOOK WORLD<br>
</font><font size=4>'Candle': Flickers of despai! ! r, hope in lives in
the shadows<br>
</b></font><font size=2><i>By Wendy Smith<br>
</i>Tuesday, November 23, 2010<br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times"><i>TAKE ONE CANDLE LIGHT A
ROOM<br>
</i>By Susan Straight<br>
Pantheon. 320 pp. $25.95<br>
Americans don't generally deal well with the fraught subjects of race and
class, often reduced in our public discourse to slogans and platitudes.
But in six novels, including the 2001
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"<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385722613?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-style-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0385722613">
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has made it her literary mission to add nuance and empathy to the
discussion. Exploring the lives of African Americans and undocumented
immigrants, she doesn't airbrush the crime and substance abuse endemic in
impoverished communities, but she reminds us that these <i>are</i>
communities, anchored in family ties and filled with hardworking,
law-abiding people who understand all too well why some in their midst
succumb to destructive despair. Straight's
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307379140?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-style-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307379140">
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community itself, revealing its strength and limitations through the
odyssey of a woman with her feet uneasily planted in two worlds.<br>
Fantine Antoine comes from Sarrat, a tiny Southern California enclave
built by her father as a refuge from racial violence. In 1958, Fantine's
mother and four other 16-year-old girls were sent west from their home
town because a white man had raped three of them and boasted he would get
the other two. Things hadn't changed that much in rural Louisiana since
Fantine's enslaved ancestor Marie-Therese was given by her owner as a
sexual favor to a white man whose child she then bore (a tale related by
Straight in "A Million Nightingales"). "It was my mother
who told me the story," says Fantine, "so that I would stay
home, safe, and never trust the outside world, or the white people in
that world."<br>
Instead, Fantine went to college and remade herself as FX Antoine, a
successful travel writer who takes sardonic amusement in her professional
contacts' attempts to guess the origins of her taupe skin and wavy hair.
Pushing 40 when her narrative begins in late August 2005, FX is the
classic, self-invented American. She lives in a trendy Los Angeles
neighborhood, her apartment decorated with mementoes from far-flung
assignments. Her best friend is a gay white photographer, himself from a
blue-collar background, who understands why FX seldom makes the 62-mile
drive to Sarrat. Like her, he has rejected the guiding principle of a
fiercely protective, self-enclosed clan that believes the only important
things in life are "the fire - the table - the tribe. There was
nothing else outside the circle that mattered."<br>
Straight poignantly evokes the mixed emotions of someone who has seized
the opportunity to move outside that home circle. For her mother, Fantine
admits, "my absence was almost as unforgivable as drug addiction or
imprisonment." Within her family, good girls, such as her
sister-in-law Clarette, become correctional officers; lost girls like her
childhood friend Glorette become crackheads and get killed. No one in
Sarrat reads the glossy magazines that publish FX; her accomplishments
are unknown to them. But leaving behind her past means that her true self
is unknown to those who know only FX. "I was floating. I was
invisible," she thinks.<br>
That isn't possible for her godson Victor, Glorette's son. He's a bright
kid, eager for the intellectual pleasures and the wider world that lured
FX away from her tribe; he's done well in community college, and FX is
urging him to apply to four-year schools. But he doesn't have his
godmother's racially indeterminate skin and hair. When members of the
privileged world Victor wants to enter see him with his drug-dealing
friends, they see only threatening black men. The restrictions imposed by
race and class are intertwined but not the same; accents can be
suppressed, clothes can be upscaled, but color is a marker for life.<br>
When Victor's friends involve him in a murder, the three flee to
Louisiana, and Fantine follows with her father. Their journey becomes a
voyage into the past, all the way back to Plaquemines Parish at the mouth
of the Mississippi, site of the plantation where Marie-Therese labored.
As they frantically search for Victor,
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/Katrina/"><b>
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.</a></b> guts Louisiana - capping a
plot rife with shootings and revelations of past violence that
occasionally seem designed to make a political point.<br>
Straight's lapses into didactic melodrama are redeemed, however, by her
textured portrait of the African American experience and her brilliantly
specific language. The voices here ring absolutely true, from the stoic,
French-inflected cadences of Fantine's father to the gangsta-wannabe
lingo and Victor's recital of lyrics from "Baba O'Riley" that
capture his conflicted soul. Meaning comes from the sound and weight of
words as well as their content.<br>
And words echo down the centuries, like the phrase reiterated throughout
"A Million Nightingales" that gives this novel its title.
"Take one candle light a room" was Marie-Therese's defiant
affirmation that her daughter, conceived from rape, brightened her
enslaved existence. Here it becomes a mandate for Fantine, who finally
sees her way clear to honoring her family's history while shining a light
toward a different future for herself and her godson.
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" color="#FF0000">Layering the
rich particulars of African American life into a classic tale of
individual desires straining against collective constraints, Straight
adds another complex, compassionate achievement to her distinguished body
of work.<br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times"><i>Smith, a contributing
editor at the American Scholar, frequently reviews books for The
Post.<br>
</i> <br>
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